Written in English for the purpose of brushing up my English skills. I'd like to make friends with someone who lives in Estonskaya, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Frivolous comments aren't welcome on this blog.

June 2016 posts

Jun 10, 2016

My office has a day care center, which takes care of the aged in the neighborhood in the daytime. The staff members pick them up at their house every weekday morning. They are physically challenged and some are solitary. In the facility, the staff members help them take baths, serve lunch, and offer rehabilitation programs and various pastimes. Then facility users are dropped at their home at 4 to 5 pm. Doctors are bound to secrecy concerning their patients, so I've not written about my workplace so much. However, I'll write about a hiking trip as I went out with them today and I'll show you some pictures below. Today I heard about their hiking to a small irises garden at 20 minutes' drive from the day care center. Fortunately the inpatients' condition was stable, so I went out with them. While I was walking with an old solitary man with his hand in my hand, I understood that he wasn't able to even take a walk by himeself, i.e. he wasn't able to go shopping for daily necessities. He might not be able to eat what he likes. His son, who lives in another city, calls him at every turn to live with his family, but the old man doesn't want to leave his hometown. The facility users were helped by a staff member one by one and enjoyed seeing irises as you see in the following picture. I was afraid of them getting heatstroke, but it was needless.

Jun 05, 2016

When I woke up, it was raining. I was sad but only because I was disappointed because I was going to ride a road bike for the first time. As my car was a 2-seater and I was not able to bring my bicycle there, I rented a road bike shown in the first picture. Then I got to the meeting point of beginners. All the participants were grouped into two groups, i.e. advanced and beginners and I belonged to the beginners, who would ride for 40km. FYI, the advanced cyclists would ride for 100km around the island. Participants classified into the beginners group were separated into smaller groups which consisted of 5 to 8 persons and each group was led by a skilled cyclist. Our team started at about 9:30 am. Reaching the entry of a large inlet, we deposited our bikes into a transportation truck as shown in the second picture. Our bikes were supposed to be carried to the destination of the small and tiny ferryboat, which we were going to get on board there. The destination of the ferryboat was the theme park of Nijushino Hitomi Eigamura. Let me write about this park. "Nijushino Hitomi" literally means 24 eyes. The park was built on the basis of the movie set for "Nijushino Hitomi", in which a young woman was dispatched as a school teacher and took on 12 pupils, i.e. 24 eyes. The story was in the era before the Great East Asian War. Years later, the teacher came back to the island and heard about the former pupil's stories. Some of them were still not accounted for in the battlefield, and some of them were killed by the enemy's bombing. Recalling her happy days with pupils, she shed tears. The ending scene was like that. The author was born on Shodoshima island and the story was from her real life. I took a walk after lunch in the park and started riding on the way back. We dropped in at a few resting sites and received cordial welcomes at every site. In the last but one picture, we were served olive-related products. The last picture was shot when all the beginners' teams got back without any accident!

Jun 04, 2016

The ferry slowly entered the principal port of Tonosho. Olive oils and cosmetics, foods derived from olives, soy sauce, and somen noodles are known as major products of this island. However, the island is not so highly evaluated as a tourist spot. The cycling tour event, which I'd join tomorrow, was planned by a major travel company and local body of commerce and industry to raise the awareness about Shodoshima among Japanese people. I'd visited the island nearly 40 years ago from the opposite side of Okayama City. I didn't remember clearly the scene of those days, but the base station of the Kankakei Gorge Ropeway remained as it used to be 40 years ago. Kankakei Gorge is the representative sightseeing spot on the island. I took a walk on the narrow path in the gorge and then the historic streets in a small village. After taking a shower in my hotel, I attended the party of the eve of the event with lots of other strange participants. My wife was going to enjoy sightseeing on the next day, not to ride a bicycle, but by courtesy of the company she enjoyed dinner with me and the performances of local people. Praying for the clear sky of the following day, I hit the sack.

The waters between Honshu and Shikoku, the largest and 4th largest island in Japan respectively are called the Seto Inland Sea. The biggest island in these waters is Shodoshima Island, which is located at an hour by ferry from Takamatsu City, the capital of Kagawa Prefecture. I'd like to join a cycling tour event there and visited the island on the previous day. The sky was clear. I took a seat on the roof with a canned coffee and my iPad. Comparing the surrounding scenery and the map on the iPad, and being blown by the comfortable sea wind, I spent about an hour there. Then, I happened to see Oshima Island on the way, which I knew since long ago by name, but didn't know where the island was. The island has a lot to do with Hansen's disease(leprosy). In the era of uninformed medicine many patients suffering from leprosy were forced to move to the island and became isolated. They had never been allowed to leave the island in their life. Most of their relatives are said to reject receiving their bodies or even their bones. The stupid superstition had prevailed on society in those days. The leprosy related facilities are now renovated into the national sanatorium for patients with chronic illnesses. The island is only 20 minutes from Takamatsu City and rich in natural environment. I'd like to visit the island before long and pay tribute to the departed in front of their cenotaph.